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  • The Paris Review

    Harold Bloom’s Immortality

    by Lucas Zwirner Oct 16, 2019 4 minutes

    Harold Bloom (Yale University Press)

    The last email I got from Harold came in on October 8 at 4:08 P.M., eight days ago. It said:

    Dear Lucas,

    I am trying to cut the size of the book. This is the new table of contents.

    Love,
    Harold

    Table of Contents 

    Prelude: The Longing for Immortality
    Chapter 1: Platonic and Neo-Platonic Immortality
    Chapter 2: Esoteric Visions of Immortality: Orphism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah
    Chapter 3: The Resurrection of the Body
    Chapter 4: Indic and Iranian Redemption
    Chapter 5: Redemption in Israel
    Chapter 6: Christian Redemption

    When I saw him over the summer, in late August, he started to. It was to be an exploration of the afterlife in the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, and Islamic traditions, the way people have imagined and hoped for something more or different once this life ends. It moved me that an eighty-nine-year-old writer and former teacher would spend whatever time was left wrestling with the very thing that would take him.

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